Oh. Shoot. I’ve bought those in the past. So they’re lying about being flushable, I suppose.

Actually, you made me wonder if CodeWars and LeetCode are comparable. I do remember CodeWars having relatively simple problems.

CodeWars is way cheaper.

Would Project Euler satisfy your requirements?

Some people understand the history and the opportunities of living in a country without tying their identity to the country. They can contribute to it, accept diversity, and yet have a more trascendental sense of self. They understand the state can be helpful for certain goals, and not for others.

It’s like money. If we all agree that a piece of paper and some metal is valuable, then it is. We don’t have to worship it. We can use it when it’s helpful and not when it’s not.

Turns out, the more educated, wealthy, and connected a whole population is, the more they are able to go from conceptual senses of self like “I am French” to a more trascendental sense of self like “I am a living being like so many others, and I happen to live in France”. This can also be achieved with certain wisdom traditions, like with loving-kindness meditation. More broadly, it can also be achieved with reflection.

To get organized, Getting Things Done in Standard Notes and my email’s calendar app.

To work, Scrum in Taiga.

To handle life, the Healthy Minds app and Calibre to read Acceptance and Commitment Therapy books.

You have a good point! It does sound like my suggestions only help for repeated behaviors. For example, Tiny Habits seems to indicate that it’ll work for habits but not for novel situations.

You explicitly mention that it’s unlikely that research covers situations that are entirely novel and rare. Do you know about schema theory or relational frame theory? I ask because both of those theories explicitly deal with how entirely new information (such as entirely new situations) is processed in the human brain and how, depending on the schemas or relational frames that a person already had, the person will react in different ways.

But we don’t have to go into the theoretical weeds. The popular books that I mentioned earlier deal with novelty. For example, Lakoff shows how, inside the head of any person, a small set of beliefs can end up guiding most of the person’s moral thinking and therefore their choices. Not only that, but even the book titled Tiny Habits has sections dedicated to one-off behaviors. Heck, the book Drive deals with teams that are at the bleeding edge of knowledge and techniques, technologies and workflows that no human has ever dealt with before, and yet the book is able to show how there is a set of evidence-based principles that consistently motivate (or not) those very teams.

The fundamental issue is whether humans are able to recognize a situation and know what to do about it. Our brains have been endowed with the capacity to derive thoughts, to think up entirely new situations, to imagine scenarios. We can use that to increase the odds of responding effectively to situations we have never been in before.

Sure, recognizing the light when it’s eclipsed by plenty of shadow can seem cartoonish. We can decide to close our eyes and be left in the darkness. We can decide not to pay attention or learn from something we deem unacceptable.

Is there absolutely nothing that China is doing that the rest of the world could learn from? Do you know how much China is investing in green energy in relation to the west? Do you think I am unable to recognize problems in China while at the same time recognizing that it is the single largest investor in green energy on Earth today? Do you think I’m unable to recognize that the United States has a great elite educational system? Or that I’m unable to recognize that the USA has amazing elite research facilities? Or that during the twentieth century it was a world leader in terms of State investments in strategic technologies?

It sounds as if you’re frustrated at her for not recognizing that people disappear in China, sometimes people like critics of the government. Do you think there’s absolutely nothing good that China does?

I understand you’re trying to increase the odds that people will intervene and that this horrible kidnapping would not be successful.

However, the fund for rewards is not the way to go.

Psychological research about human motivation shows that expecting external rewards reduces personal motivation (or, as psychologists would say it, extrinsic motivation can hinder intrinsic motivation). When humans do things because they expect external rewards, they stop doing it for the sake of it and expect higher and higher rewards over time.

Pay children to draw and they lose their interest in doodling or drawing for fun. Pay your team members for being kind and they will be less kind overall.

So what can we do? You talk to people. You understand their concerns and wishes, and you have them understand your concerns and wishes. You use frames that they already have in their head so that they can see your point of view. You set implementation intentions.

It’s a matter of values and the capacity to do the behavior.

Of course, if you’re in a dictatorial regime, stopping a state-approved kidnapping will be illegal and get you in lots of trouble. That’s why activism also seeks to change root causes. What kinds of root causes? That will depend on who you are. Some people blame the electoral system in the USA, so maybe changing that could help. Other people will blame other causes and therefore will suggest other changes.

This may be abstract, and I wish I had the time to make it less so. Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now, but you can check out sources that talk about this. Check out Drive by Pink to learn about motivation. Check out Don’t think of an Elephant by George Lakoff to learn about moral reframing. Check out Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabriele Oettingen or Tiny Habits to learn about implementation intentions.

It sounds like your point is that we should be context-aware. By being context-aware, we could avoid judging someone unfairly, such as someone who was neuro-diverse. It sounds like you really value accuracy in assessments. It also sounds like you’re saying that judging someone from one’s time with the standards of one’s time is more accurate than judging someone from the past with the standards of one’s time. If so, would you say people from our time accurately judge Donald Trump? Would you say there is consensus about how to judge Donald Trump? In other words, is there consensus in the standards of our time? Zooming out a little bit, if we are truly context-aware, would we not have to judge context-awareness itself as a reflection of who we are?

The way string of any material is woven should be durable. But plastic can be a magical material. It doesn’t cool when wet, regardless of whether it’s got fat on it (unlike wool, which requires lanolin). And its cheapness makes it readily available to billions of people.

To be clear, yes, we should avoid overproduction and overconsumption of plastic. Yes, we should research cheap ways of making durable and waterproof/still-warm-when-wet clothes that are biodegradable. Yes, we should require good filters in every washing machine and dryer so that we don’t get full of microplastics.

I think most of the criticism on Telegraph regarding how Matrix handles rooms and events are addressed by the work behind linearized matrix: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&q=linearized+matrix+messaging&t=web

EDIT BEINGS HERE

So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded “enshittification”, Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.

Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.

This does not mean that it’s not problematic that their code is closed-source.

EDIT ENDS HERE

I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.

For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.

It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.

Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.

It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.